


Red-Blooded Heart

by impatienscapensis



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, Comprehensive list of content warnings in notes, Fights, Gen, Illnesses, Mentions of Suicide, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 03:11:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21092438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impatienscapensis/pseuds/impatienscapensis
Summary: Michael has lived her life under labels.





	Red-Blooded Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Full list of all the content warnings/trigger warnings I could think of, in chronological order. This fic is somewhat dark in tone. 
> 
> -Panic attacks  
-Biowarfare  
-A severe illness  
-Blood  
-Surgery  
-Mention of suicide  
-A fist fight  
-Fire  
-Michael’s canonical death at the Learning Center  
-Attempted suicide

Michael has lived her life under labels. 

It started with  _ precious, cheery, bouncing.  _

A  _ brilliant  _ kid, a future  _ scientist, gifted.  _

Michael remembers the day her throat closed up in math class, the sensation of hot pokers jamming through her stomach and twisting, the fervent shaking, and the blank tumult in her mind, like one pearl of chaos in a blank slate, like a machine with an unidentifiable rattle. 

_ Anxious.  _

An  _ anxious _ kid, a  _ shaking  _ kid. 

She remembers her mother’s arms around her, telling her that it would be all right, breathe through it. 

A  _ loved  _ kid. Her mama’s  _ baby girl.  _

And then it upturned because of course it had to, and she felt labels fall upon her shoulders like a rain. 

_ Orphan _ , first. 

The Klingon biowarfare, heavy, thick red gas around her and in her settlements, branding her as  _ infected.  _

The blood she cried, her basic molecules mutating, spending days in agony inside a treatment centre, the strange hemoglobin she’d begin producing in danger of stopping her heart with no warning, the thing she’d seen in the patients around her. 

A  _ high-risk patient.  _

The surgeries they did to fix her liver and her kidneys and her spinal cord, leaving her  _ scarred _ , her body now a patchwork. 

The psych evaluation they gave her before her custody was given to Amanda. 

Are you scared, Michael?  _ I think.  _

Of what?  _ Of dying and of living and of leaving and my heart stopping and this disease and my parents being gone and a civil war and losing my lungs like Eric next to me and dying like Pia and — and — _

Michael had shaken so badly they’d called off the assessment. They’d pieced together some things from the rest of the interview, and Michael had listened, despite understanding nothing. 

_ Traumatized.  _

_ Extraordinarily anxious.  _

_ Possibly suicidal.  _

_ Alexithymic.  _

_ Too young.  _

And Amanda had leaned down to hug her and she’d pulled away. 

_ Adopted.  _

The moment she took the first step into Sarek’s foyer she gilds her heart in mercury and decides she will make her mother proud.

_ Vulcan _ , she claims herself. 

It isn’t too long before  _ Human _ is slapped upon her as a badge of shame. 

_ Quiet.  _

_ Physicist.  _

_ Quantum mechanist.  _

_ Red-blooded.  _

She’s been accidentally knocked over one too many times and she tackles a student to the ground, slams her weak Human fists into his chest until his stronger friends throw Michael Burnham halfway across the room and break her arm for good measure.

_ Suspended.  _

_ Wild child.  _

Michael screams at the burning, howling for it to stop, for help, please, and she succumbs to the flames, the desperate cries of other students serenading her to her death. 

_ Dead.  _

She wakes in a hospital bed. 

_ Afraid of doctors.  _

She shouldn’t be alive, she shouldn’t, there are others that died because someone had wanted Michael dead.

_ Guilty.  _

Michael gives them what they want, to stop them from hurting more. She tries to, anyway, but Spock finds her, on the bench out in the woods that she’d put herself on to see the sunrise, and takes the hypo out of her hand. His tiny fingers close around it, and she knows he doesn’t understand what she’s doing but he knows it’s bad. She vows not to put him through that. 

_ Big sister.  _

She’s ill, she knows she is, but Sarek doesn’t support her. But she looks anyway, asks Amanda, and there’s more medication, another hypo to her daily routine. 

_ Deeply paranoid.  _

_ Prone to night terrors.  _

Michael fiddles with the long, straight hair of the girl that sits beside her in calculus, letting the wind howl past them, through the field of solar panels they’re hiding in. She kisses her, and T’Pana kisses back, awkward but soft. 

_ Bisexual.  _

She works constantly, studies during all her free time, accepts nothing less than ninety-eight percent. 

_ Burnt out.  _

And she fails her entry to the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, and the mercury sloughs off her raw, red heart. 

_ Reject.  _

_ A failure.  _

And the Shenzhou. 

Her perfect, perfect captain, who took her hand and brought her into the warmth of humanity. 

An  _ in-field graduate of Starfleet.  _

_ Ensign.  _

A  _ xenoanthropologist, healing.  _

_ Lieutenant.  _

A  _ bright young woman.  _ Philippa calls her  _ darling.  _

_ Lieutenant commander.  _

The Captain’s _ girlfriend.  _ Philippa’s _ sweetheart. _

_ Commander.  _

The captain’s  _ lover.  _ Philippa’s _ love _ . Pippa’s  _ dear. _

_ Number One.  _

Her recovery was happening. Her throat didn’t close off. Her hands didn’t tremble. She could live without thinking back. Her mind settled and she _healed_. 

And it fell because of course it did. 

She was too many things to name. 

_ Mutineer.  _

_ Incendiary.  _

_ Cause.  _

_ Effect.  _

And she stopped trying to better herself and spent six months in a haze of sleep, being awake for no longer than necessary, despite her  _ insomniac  _ tendencies. 

And there was the Discovery. 

She planned to become an  _ altruist  _ in the extreme. To crucify herself only to save a beetle. To push her  _ self-sacrificial  _ tendencies to the front. 

To die a  _ martyr _ . 

And it worked, almost, but never quite, because her crew cared about her. 

Because Pike stormed into her room and told her she couldn’t be a martyr anymore, that she couldn’t die, because they loved her, Tilly and Ash and Keyla and everyone, that this wasn’t just an overly-protective self-sacrificial Starfleet officer. 

Michael listened. 

And soon enough she found herself at the center of a hug, Ash and Tilly and Pike and everyone, it felt like, supporting her. 

_ Loved,  _ once again. 


End file.
